A Cunning Plan

were being sent, he used JiLsi’s password, MSR206 (the name of the legendary credit-card cloning machine used by all good carders), and – hey presto! – it worked. Iceman discovered JiLsi was bad-mouthing him to his own ISP. This was unforgivable. JiLsi had indeed crossed a line that no (dis)honest carder should ever breach, regardless of how bad relations became: he had ratted on a member of the fraternity. Worse than that, he had been caught doing it.

Iceman disseminated the news far and wide. Before long it came to the attention of Cha0.

In the aftermath of the Iceman accusations, everyone was still feeling a little jittery. Were the Feds on the case? But more than this, if they were, ‘Who the fuck was working with them?’, as one of the DM administrators put it. Iceman, Splyntr, c0rrupted0ne or Silo from CardersMarket; Shtirlitz, the enigmatic ‘Russian’; or perhaps Dark- Market’s new moderator, Lord Cyric? Or someone else?

The two people whom nobody had hitherto accused of working for the police were Matrix001 and JiLsi. They had occasionally accused the latter of incompetence (and not without reason). But police work? Never. Iceman had long known JiLsi’s password from his hacking forays. But now everyone appeared to know it. There was some suspicion that a third party had infiltrated a trojan onto JiLsi’s beloved memory stick and that they were now monitoring every keystroke he made, thus becoming privy to DarkMarket’s deepest secrets. Or maybe JiLsi was not who he said he was . . . maybe he was somehow connected with the mystery company from 2000 Technology Drive – Pembroke Asso- ciates?

A few days before Christmas 2006, JiLsi logged onto DarkMarket as usual to check out the traffic. He wasn’t on for long before heading out again to attend to his real-life affairs. That afternoon he was back. ‘Username: JiLsi,’ he typed. ‘Password: MSR206.’ In a blink, the machine returned ‘Incorrect Username or Password’. Automatically JiLsi tried again, assuming he had made a typo. The result was the same. He tried again and again.

There was no room for doubt: JiLsi, spiritual owner and chief admin- istrator of DarkMarket, had been excluded from his own site. Panicked, he tried to log onto www.mazafaka.ru. No dice. The Vouched – another of his sites – no entry.

It wasn’t long before cold turkey kicked in. JiLsi had never known